DiffWAM: A Fast and Efficient Navigation World Action Model

Abstract:Pretrained video foundation models encode rich semantic and spatiotemporal priors for embodied navigation, yet converting these priors into UAV motion typically requires expensive future-video synthesis and geometric reconstruction. We investigate whether the motion implicit in future visual prediction can instead be recovered directly from the predictive representations of a frozen video model. To this end, we present DiffWAM, a geometry-conditioned navigation world-action model that directly transforms multi-level predictive features into continuous camera trajectories. Its Grid-Motion module preserves spatial-temporal motion associations, while Latent2Pose grounds them with first-frame geometry to recover metrically meaningful 3D motion. Complete video rollouts and geometric reconstruction are required only for offline supervision, eliminating future-video decoding and multi-frame reconstruction during deployment. We further introduce FastDreamer, which overlaps predictive and geometric computation with ongoing flight and performs timestamp-aware asynchronous trajectory handoff for continuous UAV execution. DiffWAM achieves a trajectory RMSE of 0.3492 m and an endpoint success rate of 74.40% on the 1,000-sample DiffWAM-1000 benchmark, while representative real-world experiments demonstrate complex behaviors including constrained traversal, orbiting, S-shaped flight, and multi-stage navigation. An onboard DiffWAM-Flash implementation further reaches 1.08 s model-pipeline latency on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor. These results demonstrate that predictive video representations can be efficiently grounded into continuous 3D motion, providing a direct alternative to generate-then-reconstruct navigation pipelines. Project page: this https URL.

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.39763 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.39763v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.39763 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.